So far this semester, we have read two books involving time travel. The first being Slaughterhouse-Five, and the second being Kindred. Although the general idea of time travel is the same, the specifics and use of time travel in relation to the novel is very different.
In SF, Vonnegut seems to use time travel as an escape mechanism, to avoid talking about the war at times. Also, time travel isn't the main theme or idea of the novel, it just kind of happens. It's very sudden and the actual idea of time traveling isn't really a big deal. Billy Pilgrim is simply taken from one point in his life and plopped down in another part of his life and continues to live it. Billy takes his time travel for granted at this point, after it has happened many times. However, there is speculation that Vonnegut didn't even mean for Billy's time traveling to be real in the context of the novel. He may have used it just to show mental flashbacks as a possible symptom of PTSD or to cope with the war better. Additionally, Billy's time travel is not as traditional as the kind of time travel we often see in movies and such, where a character travels back to a pivotal point in history (like most of The Magic Treehouse series or the Babe & Me, Honus & Me, etc. series), but, in this case, a character travels back to different points in his own life (like Back to the Future), which happens to coincide with a famous point in history, WWII.
However, in Kindred, Dana's time travel is part of the main premise of the novel and is of the more traditional nature as explained above, where a character travels back in time to a pivotal point in history --in this case slavery-- and often tries to alter history for the better. Dana quickly learns what she must do to prepare for her trips to the past, tying a bag of supplies to her waist in case she goes back. Her travels take her back more than 100 years, way before she was born. Because of this, Dana has no interaction with herself in the past that may lead to any SF like experiences. With Billy, he is always traveling back, confined to the walls of his own life. This makes his travels much less exciting and scary, because he knows it is still him, living his life, with people he knows, where he is welcomed. With Dana, she is the same character, but she is thrust into a completely different time period where she is expected to act and behave a certain way, something she is not accustomed to living in the 1970s.
Although we have not yet finished Kindred, it is obvious that, although it involves the same idea of time travel as Slaughterhouse-Five, it is hard to compare the two novels based on this idea, because the situations in which time travel takes place, as well as the kind of time travel that occurs is so different.
There are a number of ways we could parse this important distinction, but you're getting at a really important, basic-level point here: in Vonnegut, the "unstuck in time" stuff functions as a way to *avoid* writing about a topic directly, and therefore seems more like a reflection of Billy's traumatized psyche, while in Butler, it's a way of *forcing* herself (through Dana, her alter-ego in the novel) to confront a historical past she'd rather NOT visit. Time travel isn't fun or interesting at all--she'd rather forget all about this time--but the novel makes it so she can't avoid confronting it. She has to actually meet and interact with an even care about these profoundly damaged individuals who are her ancestors.
ReplyDeleteThere are definitely a lot of differences in the time travel between the two novels. While looking through SH5 I found a similarity just in the technicalities of time travel itself. Referring to Billy, "He hadn't been missed, he said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken him through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for a microsecond." So just as Dana in Kindred experiences only a short time loss in the present day, Billy doesn't really lose time after traveling to Tralfamadore.
ReplyDelete